Solving the 10 Most Common Social Media Marketing Challenges

Today, there are 2.307 billion active social media users around the world. That’s nearly one-third of our planet’s total population of 7.125 billion!

As social media marketing professionals, we’re lucky to reach even .000001% of that population with any one of our posts. This can feel a bit underwhelming for businesses and marketers looking to demonstrate the true value and ROI of social media.

Everywhere we look it appears that brands and companies have it all figured outon social media. With each new post to Facebook, Instagram or Twitter comes thousands of likes, comments, and shares.

Even Grumpy Cat has earned more than $100 million dollars since 2012!

This leaves the rest of us wondering, “What are we not doing right on social media?”

We’ve experimented, made mistakes, and even learned a little bit in the process. From that, we’ve put together a playbook on solving the 10 most common social media marketing challenges.

Let’s jump in!

1. Authentic connection with the audience

We’ve been seeing a massive shift in what it means to be effective on social media over the last few years. One challenge that marketers are facing in this new era of social media marketing is connecting with audiences on an individual and personal level.

Connecting with your audience helps to humanize your brand and build real, authentic relationships.

Solving this challenge: 

Connect with your audience by utilizing free or low-cost brand monitoring tools such as Respond, Mention, or TweetDeck and respond to every single comment on Twitter.

Monitor all additional social media channels and respond to each comment in an authentic way. You can do this by asking questions, linking to other blog posts, providing insights, or offering help with a problem.

You may also consider creating and growing a niche forum or group on Facebook or LinkedIn, or even creating your own dedicated community site similar to inbound.org or GrowthHackers – this gives you the opportunity to engage with users as well as let them indulge their passions and connect with like-minded people.

2. Creating a social media marketing strategy

You may know what you want to accomplish and why, but without a social media marketing strategy, you won’t have a specific plan on how to get there.

Think of your social media plan as a roadmap to your goals – Sure, you can stop off and check out landmarks along the way (experimentation), but you’ll want to return to the road that gets you to your destination in the shortest time and distance (goals).

Solving this challenge: 

Creating a solid social media marketing strategy doesn’t have to take weeks to put together. For me, it helps to have 3 key things written down on paper:

• Why we’re on social: Simply being active of social media channels for the sake of being there is one of the quickest ways to burn valuable time and resources. First, answer the question of ‘why’  your business is on social and what you would like to accomplish.
• How we’re going to succeed: Next is to ask the question of how. This can be specific social channels, paid advertising budget, video or image creation, partnering with influencers.
• How we’ll measure success: Key Metrics, Goals or OKRs that you would like to accomplish broken down into days, weeks, months, and the year. Breaking it down like this will allow you to focus on day-to-day activities while also keeping the big picture in mind.

3. A dramatic drop in organic reach

What worked in 2012 when organic reach on social was booming vs. what’s working now with the decline of organic reach has many social media managers scrambling to find tactics that work, including myself.

If growing your organic reach doesn’t seem to be working, there may be another solution.Solving this challenge: 

Marketers can overcome this obstacle by looking at the decline of organic reach as an opportunity in disguise. That opportunity is paid social media advertising.

Even if you only have $5 to spend on boosting a Facebook post or promoting a Tweet, putting a few dollars behind the content you’ve worked hard to create will effectively get that content in front of hundreds potential customers. Look for posts with high engagement but low reach as a good barometer for potential success.

Use a combination of Facebook Audience Insights and Twitter Audience Insights to learn about your audience and create personas. Once you have an idea of who they are, use those insights to create highly-targeted ads that will resonate with users.

4. Coming up with consistently good content

We completely understand. Managing social media is extremely time-consuming, and can become a full-time job. Which is why staying creative and original is one of the toughest social media marketing challenges to overcome.

The social media manager checklist seems to go on forever: curate, create, schedule, monitor, respond, update, and reuse content across several different social profiles.

That’s why it’s important for social media marketers to find little hacks to optimize their time.

Solving this challenge: 

Besides basic content curation and idea generation tactics like monitoring Facebook pages or scouring Buzzsumo and Quora for content, there are other less time-consuming tactics you can experiment with today.

Openness & Transparency: Some of our most popular content and social media posts are ones that feature an inside look into Buffer’s culture.

People love knowing that there is a “real person” behind the social media profile and by giving them a look into your company or brand you will evoke real human interaction.

Original graphics: We’ve also generated some excellent buzz by creating original graphics in Pablo or Canva and posting them to our social channels. This image, for example, received more than 100 retweets on our Twitter account in less than an hour.

To create it, we pulled stats from around the web and put them into a simple graphic, which only took about 30 minutes to create.

5. Content quantity over quality

For some brands, the way to cut through all of the noise on social media is to simply post more. While this tactic may work for some, for many it has the tendency to irritate followers.

The Next Web posts 30-40 times per day on Facebook due to the high amount of new content they’re putting out online. But many businesses who are creating less content may struggle to show value from more frequent posting.

Solving this challenge: 

An excellent way to think about the quantity vs. quality is to treat every piece of content—every tweet, every Facebook post, every CTA, every press outreach email—with the utmost care, as Leo explains in our Buffer marketing manifesto.

People will naturally follow your brand over time from posting great content, not posting more content.

Marketers can benefit from embracing the “everything matters” mentality when generating content for their blog, graphics for social media, and forums for connecting.

6. Getting content to a large social audience

Now that you have all of this great content for your blog and social media channels, people will surely follow, right?

As marketers know, this isn’t always the case. Promoting content, partnering with brands and influencers, and capturing audiences’ attention is a whole new social media challenge in itself.

The encouraging news is that if your content is enjoyed by a few people on your blog, then the chances are that people on social media will enjoy it as well. The challenge is getting it to those people.

Solving this challenge:

Just like in investing, the “Compound Effect” is a powerful idea that works with social media promotion as well.

Let’s say every one person on Twitter has 100 friends that follow them, and those 100 friends have 100 friends that follow them. Even if only 5% of the total friends share your content, that’s still a massive amount of shares and impressions.

The key is not to sit back and hope that people share your content, but toactively seek out people that you know will benefit from it. A few ideas to get you started:

• Email your friends, family, and coworkers
• Direct message influencers–in a genuine way–on social media
• Join LinkedIn groups or online forums in your niche market
• Syndicate your content (A complete guide from Neil Patel)
• Republish content to Medium
• Ask questions and respond to comments on Quora

7. Finding ways to encourage sharing on social

One thing that is particularly challenging on social media is finding ways to avoid what I like to call a “creative rut.” A creative rut is when social media managers find a tactic that works a few times and then continually go back to them over and over, even though the results may be even or declining.

Only posting blog links on Facebook, quotes on Instagram, or links to your own articles on Twitter are examples of content that is good, but could maybe use a creative boost.

Solving this challenge: 

Think “share first” by getting inside the mind of your audience. Before posting ask, “Is this something that I would like, comment on, read, or share on social media?” If the answer is “no” that may be a sign to look for other types of content.

The New York Times once published an excellent study on the psychology of sharing. It boiled down to the fact that sharing on social media is all about relationships. The study indicated that 49% of respondents said they share to bring valuable and entertaining content to others.

Jeff Bullas shared an excellent list of 10 ways to create contagious content with some fun ideas including:

• Telling Great Stories
• Making Your Audience Look Smart & Classy
• Using Emotional Appeal

8. Using data to back intuition

How many of us wing it when tracking data in order to guide our social media strategy? I know I’ve been guilty of this a few times!

Previously, social media data was hard to access, difficult to understand, and seemingly useless. But these days, there are so many amazing tools out there that accessing data is a must-do for marketers looking to take their social to the next level.

Solving this challenge: 

Start by creating a simple Excel spreadsheet with each of the social media channels that you’re managing on the left and the most important stats you would like to track across the top.

Here’s a quick snapshot of the sheet I use: (Download the full Social Media Metrics Dashboard):

Tracking metrics week-to-week and month-to-month helps me to visualize if my intuition is working. That way I can quickly implement experiments, track the data, and pivot to another tactic if things aren’t on the rise.

Check out the entire Buffer Social Media Strategy to see how we pulled the data from each network so that you can start tracking your own.

9. Creating quality visuals and graphics

Visuals and graphics are the second most important factor for success on social media right behind the quality content. But creating quality visuals and graphics are another challenge on their own, regarding skill level and time it takes to create them.

Seeing as how visual content is more than 40X more likely to get shared on social media than other types of content, there’s never been a better time to invest in visuals of your own.

Solving this challenge:

Two of our favorite go-to sources of great visuals are high-quality stock photos and original images created by our team.

For high-quality stock photos, we’ve put together a massive list of 53+ free image sources. For original images, we suggest either Pablo or Canva. Each is fun, easy to use, and allow marketers to customize each image size based on the targeted social media channel.

A few design rules of thumb:

• Avoid overused stock photos
• Ensure each image is properly sized for specific networks
• Use best-practices with text overlay
• Design with consistent brand colors, palettes, and logos

*Infographic created by Ethos3 

10. Focusing on the things that matter most

A common thought in the social media sphere is that there’s a silver bullet of growth and engagement. The truth is that it takes a lot of work to create a community of engaged followers and brand advocates.

Growth and engagement are a result of a variety of factors, but figuring out which activities to focus on is an important challenge in social media marketing.

Solving this challenge:

When putting first things first, it’s helpful for me to refer to Brian Balfour’sGrowth Machine. Brian points out that a lot of marketers focus on tactics first, rather than creating a growth process.

Tactics first is putting the cart before the horse.  You need a process that will help you build a scalable, predictable, and repeatable growth machine.

– Brian Balfour

The most important part is having one growth process and sticking to it no matter what.

Know your channels, your audience, and your market inside and out and make strategic experiment decisions based on those learnings. Doing so will help to focus on the things that matter most.

Over to you!

Thanks for reading! What challenges do you often face when it comes to social media? We’d love to hear from you below!

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Why It Takes So Long to Achieve Social Media Success

If you’re impatient, social media is probably the wrong marketing channel for you. Here’s a chart that illustrates why.

This is data from the recent research released by Social Media Examiner. This is not a scientific study, but it is a view from nearly 4,000 marketers, skewed toward small businesses. So we can’t regard it as absolute truth but it is probably directionally correct. Let’s take a close look at what we can learn from the feedback provided by these active social media marketers.

First, let’s examine the expectations they have from their social media initiatives:

A pretty comprehensive list. It’s interesting that “soft benefits” like awareness and loyalty are at the top of the chart when everybody seems to be preoccupied with ROI. Perhaps marketers are beginning to finally acknowledge the important qualitative benefits of social media marketing.

Social media success takes time

Now let’s refer to the chart at the top of the post again. When we compare a soft benefit like awareness with a “hard” benefit like sales, we see that most people even just starting with social media recognize an immediate benefit on the awareness front. In fact about 80 percent saw results in the first year compared to 35 percent who saw an increase in sales right out of the gate.

This chart would imply that you have to work hard on your social media marketing for at least 3-4 years before most businesses see an impact on sales. And the most successful businesses realizing a true ROI may have been at it five years or more, a category where 70 percent of the respondents could see an increase in sales.

Weak relational links

Why does it take so long for the sales to kick in?

One of the biggest problems many businesses face is they compare social media marketing efforts with advertising. That is an inaccurate comparison because the mechanisms and benefits are different. If you need to drive rapid awareness or pump up sales with a coupon, advertising still works really well (assuming people see your ads!).

While social media has many benefits including marketing research, customer service, and collaboration, for many businesses it’s primarily about building relationships that lead to sales. But social media connections are weak relational links. Social media platforms simply open new doors, and it takes time to turn those connections into strong links that are actionable.

Instead of comparing social media marketing to advertising, it might be accurate to comparing it to the benefits of attending an annual trade show or networking meeting where it takes time to build relationships that lead to sales.

So yes, the immediate benefit of social media marketing is awareness and that is IMPORTANT because awareness leads to engagement. Over time, that engagement may result in trust. And it’s not until we get to that point that we can begin seeing some cash coming in the door … maybe years down the line.

This is why social media marketing can be a hard sell to executives who are accustomed to the overnight results of advertising. Unfortunately, many traditional kinds of advertising present diminishing returns as people spend less time with newspapers, local radio, and network television. For this reason, it makes good sense to start moving up that social media sales curve now, right?

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The Habits Of The Successful Pros That Will Dramatically Improve Your Social Media Strategy

Sometimes the most effective way you can make a difference to your marketing relies on you making small, positive tweaks. Ones you can implement on a daily basis. To help you come up with something you can try out, we’ve asked some of the leading social media marketers of big brands for their secrets. They have divulged some of their daily practices that keep them at the top of their game, take notes.

Check The Big Picture

Tim Love, Social Media Manager, Pizza Express

Every business needs an overarching plan for their social media strategy. While it can’t necessarily be planned right down to every individual post, checking the big social plan for your business every day can help ensure all of your content is aligned with your social goals.

“Mapping out the content calendar as far in advance as possible and referring to it on an almost daily basis allows me to take a step back from day-to-day posting and look at the wider content strategy. Having a thorough content calendar also gives me a proper oversight of our content strategy in action, and allows me to analyse results and trends more easily.”
 
Tim Love, Social Media Manager, Pizza Express

Constantly Strive To Find & Develop Your Voice

Greg Allum, Social Media Manager,British Gas

The social media strategies that have reaped the most success have usually been the ones that have helped to clearly define the brand’s social voice. It will help you cut through the noise on social and deliver a clear message. If you get in the habit of thinking about your brand’s unique voice whenever you’re executing actions on social media you’ll find yourself having a much more distinct presence delivering better results.

“We don’t operate in a one size fits all medium. I encourage our agencies and internal staff to discover their own voice, then apply it to the work they do. Social Media is part art, part science and we’ve seen a big shift in recent times to the data being the be all and end all. My role is to challenge social media marketers to take this data and then convert it into consumable, yet engaging content for our social channels.”
 
Greg Allum, Social Media Manager, British Gas

Be Organised

Antonia Harler, UK Social Media Manager, The Body Shop

In a big company, a lot of things may be happening all the time and with different demands. Getting in the habit of keeping your ship in order will help to keep you efficient, flexible, and sane. Devise a system whereby you can complete your regular tasks on time and still have room for flexibility, planning, and learning about areas of the company who you may need to help out.

“If there is one thing I have learned during my time as a Social Media professional it is this: Creativity is important. Organisation as well as the ability to plan and execute is vital. Behind a brand are many moving pieces. Some move quicker than others and some departments plan much further in advance than the social department. Being able to navigate the two is critical to making any social media strategy a success. Things that help me stay on top of things are an old fashioned notebook, a detailed content planner, detailed budget sheets and tools for scheduling, analytics, and monitoring.”
 
Antonia Harler, UK Social Media Manager, The Body Shop

“Social media tends to be made up of a thousand tiny activities. To be more efficient, I like to batch tasks when possible. I’ll spend an afternoon chunking content into social posts or creating a slew of images. Being able to focus on the task at hand helps me do it better and faster, freeing me up for the real-time, quick turnaround work that social media is all about.”
 
Robyn Showers, Social Media Manager, HubSpot

Always Experiment

Maggy Van Eijk, Social Media Editor,Buzzfeed UK

You don’t get ahead of the curve by sitting in the same spot. The more you’re used to trying out new things, the more likely it will be that you’ll find the next game changing tool, idea, or viral success.

“Experiment as much as possible! If there’s a new tool available to you, try it out, even if you feel like you don’t have the time, or it’s not 100% worth it. Social media is always changing, so it’s vital you stay on top of things. You’ll keep your accounts fresh by alternating the type of posts you push out, and if things don’t work, shrug it off and move on. By experimenting you might just figure something new out, before the rest of your competitors do!”
 
Maggy Van Eijk, Social Media Editor, Buzzfeed UK

Think About Your Calls To Action

While you want to have the funniest, cleverest, and most engaging posts, you’re still there to deliver results for your brand. Not every post has to be a direct sell, but it’s worth getting into the habit of creatively thinking about how you can call customers to action with your social posts. Even if you can’t use them that day, you could build up a library to pull out when appropriate.

“Regularly devising posts that have a call-to-action – and the measurable ROI that comes with a CTA – is hugely helpful in proving the value of social as well as giving customers the opportunity to act on the interest they might have in your business.”
 
Tim Love, Social Media Manager, Pizza Express

Join us on Valentine's Day - http://t.co/i5SC0UZzJB - & decide: the last Dough Ball or romance? https://t.co/eWevG38Qkv
— PizzaExpress (@PizzaExpress) February 10, 2015

Keep An Eye On The Rest Of The Industry

Claire Warne, Senior Social Media Specialist, TUI

Nobody can reinvent the wheel every day, getting your daily dose of new ideas is an important facet of keeping your social channels fresh. A regular check of social media news will keep your understanding of the industry up to scratch too.

“The best thing I find for my job is just to get involved in social media. Follow a wide range of brands (not just in your industry) and join in the conversation. Take some time to think about what works for them and why. How can you adapt that so it’s relevant for your audience?”
 
Claire Warne, Senior Social Media Specialist, TUI

Track Your Performance Regularly

Robyn Showers, Social Media Manager, HubSpot

As with any marketing channel, it’s vital that you regularly keep a record of how your activity has performed. This will give you an opportunity to help demonstrate the effectiveness of your campaigns and help to prove the ROI that your social channels are providing.

“Each Monday, I analyze the previous week’s performance in the context of the entire quarter. I look at reach, engagement, lead generation, traffic, and conversion rates. Taking a good look at what went wrong and right puts me in the right mindset to course correct or double down in the week ahead.”
 
Robyn Showers, Social Media Manager, HubSpot

Regularly Seek Inspiration

Ian Covey, Social Media Manager,Cogent Elliott

Inspiration for social content can come from absolutely anywhere. If you’re keeping a steady stream of news, content, and ideas flowing into your head then you’ll have a lot more interesting angles or thoughts to pluck out than if you’re creative consumption is minimal.

“A key habit we encourage the social team at Cogent to adopt is curiosity. Being interested in our clients businesses and what’s going on in the wider world is something that makes writing content so much easier. Often it’s the little things that can make a big difference. So listening to the radio or a podcast on the way to work, flicking through the papers while you grab your lunch at corner shop, or checking up on the key industry websites and social channels while having a cuppa really help the words flow from your fingers when you need them to.”
 
Ian Covey, Social Media Manager, Cogent Elliott

These are the social media marketing habits that the pros swear by, integrating them into your daily routine could help to make a serious mark on your brand’s social media activity. What are the social media habits that you’ve found have helped to gradually improve your social media presence?

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